Westmoreland County Retirement System

Westmoreland County Retirement System

The Westmoreland County Retirement System is a defined-benefit public pension plan based in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, providing retirement, disability, and survivor benefits to county employees. The Retirement Board is chaired by County Commissioner Sean Kertes, with County Controller Jeffrey Balzer serving as Secretary. The board also includes Commissioners Douglas W. Chew and Ted Kopas, as well as County Treasurer Jared Squires. The system has received the Government Finance Officers Association Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting. The plan allocates across a conventional public pension mix — public equities, fixed income, and real estate — but supplementing this with a dedicated life settlements portfolio and mortgage-backed securities. While the precise fund structures are not publicly enumerated, the presence of life settlements indicates access to esoteric, actuarially driven private-credit-adjacent strategies. These positions suggest relationships with specialist secondary-market or insurance-linked managers. The fund's public equity exposure is assumed to be largely index or commingled-vehicle based, consistent with its peer set among mid-tier Pennsylvania county plans. The system operates from the Westmoreland County Courthouse in Greensburg with a lean internal staff; most investment implementation is outsourced through consultant relationships and commingled fund commitments. As of the latest publicly available financial reports, the plan disclosed participation in the Government Finance Officers Association network but has not published a detailed breakdown of individual external managers. The most recent operational disclosures affirm the plan continues to function as a traditional defined-benefit arrangement, with the board meeting regularly to review actuarial valuations and custodian reports. What separates this fund structurally from its Pennsylvania county peers is less size or strategy and more the accounting-grade visibility it offers. The plan explicitly discloses a life settlements sleeve — an asset class many funds keep buried in broader alternatives line items — and publicly files for the GFOA reporting standard. For an institutional allocator or GP, the transparency signal is the differentiator, suggesting a board comfortable with acknowledging niche exposures and open to manager dialogue around credit-adjacent, uncorrelated strategies.